Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code. Update by TH: Rebuttals are appearing all over the web, like this one by Canonical's Matt Zimmerman ("He's refuting a claim which has, quite simply, never been made. [...] When this sort of thing happens on mailing lists, it's called trolling."), or this one by another Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland.

But you do get Mr Shuttleworth saying that other other distributions should base their kernel of Ubuntu's as it is more stable and better tested...

It sounds like Shuttleworth but I have not seen that particular accusation before. Can you provide a link.

and you get him projecting a leadership image where he is leading the Gnome community down a path and asking others to move to his tools instead of Canonical to upstream's.

This I can see as an extreme interpretation of Shuttleworth's talks but I do not really agree with the interpretation. Can you give examples of this?

What this presentation shows that while Canonical talks the talk, it is not yet walking the walk. It is valid and debunks the leadership myth that Mark Shuttleworth is trying to project.

And you are arguing against Mark Shuttleworth's projection of leadership, not Canonical's contributions. If GKH has problems with Mark S. then he should have based the talk on such and backed this up with accurate facts.